More interactive content, better security, a couple of new forums, fixing long-standing bugs (threadsmashes, bannings, profiles, etc). Myself and a couple of the other admins have begun testing it. We'll open it to a few people by the end of Feb. If all things run smoothly, as they seldom do when we're waiting on programmers and designers all the time, should have the new, improved (fingers crossed!) site up and running by mid-March.

DiS has a lot of legacy problems (the site was built by volunteers back in 2000... so it's a bit like a 1920s go kart that needs to fly people trans-atlantic), so I need someone who is au fait with various coding languages, and there aren't a heap of Ruby on Rails coders as it is.
But, yeah... web designers, there are a lot, it isn't so much the design, it's the chewing gummed together code under the hood that is the issue.

The guy who was working on it got a 3month contract last Feb, when I was nearly finished. This then turned into a 6month contract. Then he took a month off to make a dubstep album and then got offered a tour of America (and got back a few days ago). So I found someone new in November, but he still has other projects on the go, and for some reason is ill again, and has only done 4 days since November. I was meant to be able to start testing on Jan 11th, but I'm still waiting......... (NOT AT ALL FRUSTRATED!!!!!!!!!) He's only working on the new site, so at the minute we have that, running in parallel to this one, and things are being fixed on there, but not on here, which is all a bit of a ballache, especially when the site was originally meant to be live in about May 2011...

However, so far we have upgraded Ruby and Rails (which is a bit like upgrading from Windows 95 to Windows 8, and then getting the latest version of Google Chrome), and moved to a far more stable and much cheaper server (server prices have dropped LOADS in the past 5 years, but DiS wasn't compatible with a lot of them). There were a lot of jargon words thrown around, that I had to learn, that I won't bore you with, but we've essentially moved from using software from about 2008, to something more 2013-ish (although it's probably 2012-ish at the minute)

The main thing will be a new lick of paint at first. We want to ensure things are stable and quick, before developing much new stuff. I've stripped out a lot of junk in the trunk, and made accessing the site via mobile (which now accounts for about 15% of our traffic) a priority. And hope that we can quite quickly bring in an app for phones, once the new site is done and we can give access to more developers.

The biggest problem has been that in the delays between finding the right people post-Tom, and finding the funds (DiS is run quite hand to mouth, and we were about 6months with no income post-Sky, so it's been a lot of borrowing to keep things going, and playing catch up...), is that things have gone wrong with the current site, and at over £300 a day for developer time, a lot of our budget ended up just keeping this site alive, rather than developing a new one.

So, yeah, it's all very boring, and rather expensive, and I really should have just waited, raised £20k, and got some agency to do all the work in less than a month, instead of trying to do it all for £8k, working around people's schedules. You live. You learn. You frustrate yourself, and people think you don't care. Etc. Etc.

They've all had impeccable CVs, hence being in demand by so many other people.
Finding developers who are easy to pin down to deadlines, whilst also running the site, writing, and not totally understanding everything they say or how long things take, now that's another matter.

Will there be an API that will allow people to write apps for the new site? I had started an android app that would just screen scrape the content. I've got as far as allowing a user to log in and view threads but if the site is going to completely change then there is not much point continuing

It will just download a page and then manually go through it for the sections that are posts etc and extract the content from them. If the structure of the web pages changes I would need to change my app. But if there is an API then I would not need to do that nonsense at all.